INTERNATIONAL TRADE LAW PERSPECTIVES ON CROSS-BORDER NFT TRANSACTIONS INVOLVING GEOGRAPHICAL TRANSACTIONS

As businesses increasingly incorporate NFTs, legal issues have expanded beyond copyright and trademarks into less explored areas of intellectual property , including Geographical Indications (GIs). GI protection has traditionally relied on the connection between a product, its geographical origin and the collective reputation built by its producers. Although blockchain technology enables digital assets to be tokenised and traded globally through decentralised networks, existing international GI frameworks remain territorial , having been developed for tangible goods and conventional markets. This creates important questions regarding the ability of existing legal frameworks to regulate the cross-border commercial use of protected geographical names, products and reputations. This paper examines the relationship between NFTs and Geographical Indications from an international trade law perspective. Using a doctrinal and comparative approach, it analyses the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), together with the legal approaches adopted in India, the European Union and the United States. It further examines scholarship on blockchain governance, digital ownership of GIs and the protection of GIs in decentralised digital markets to assess whether existing legal principles adequately prevent the commercial appropriation of geographical reputation. The study finds that the principal legal issue lies not in blockchain technology itself but in the growing conflict between the territorial nature of GI protection and the borderless character of digital trade . It argues that the tokenisation of GI-related products and reputations constitutes a distinct form of commercial exploitation deserving greater attention under international trade law. By bringing together two fields of scholarship that have largely developed independently, the paper contributes to the emerging debate on regulating digital assets and proposes a principled legal framework for safeguarding Geographical Indications in an increasingly decentralised global trading system.